In the following essay, Howard discusses The House of Mirth as a turning point in Wharton's artistic and intellectual development.

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature!

—Charles Darwin

It is just over ninety years since Edith Wharton made her agreement with Scribner's Magazine to finish and publish in serial form a work which she had found troubling. The House of Mirth is a novel of New York Society, the world she never completely discarded though she declared she had given it up. Henry James, while praising the historical reenactments and Italian setting of Wharton's first novel, The Valley of Decision, crisply advised her “in favor of an American subject.” The Master proposed that she “Do New York,” and Mrs. Wharton proceeded to...